RPGuy96

Evans is also strategically useful against - and exposed to attack from - Augustria, the consequences of which we'll see in the next two chapters. In a time of upheaval across the continent, it definitely benefits an expansionist Grannvale to hold it. Especially since Jungby and Chalphy are awkwardly positioned to defend an attack from the west, as shown in the Prologue. Soon there will be invincible yellow units that can hold chokepoints like the bridge between Verdane and Grannvale but maybe the Grannvalians haven't invented yellow yet.

Yikes, is that Valaflame in the Prologue? After scrolling down more, yes, yes it is. It feels like he could get a story promotion here, but then starting him off unmounted surrounded by mounts would be kind of underwhelming. Maybe it would reinforce that horses = gods in this game.

Man, I love Genealogy, stupid as it often is. Huzzah for finishing Mystery! The story starts strong with Lang, and then, as you said, it's disappointing with all the Book 1 villains villaining the way they did in Book 1, with the exception of Hardin. I mentioned already, but I do like how Kaga starts to explore more with gameplay/story integration in Book 2. This was the first attempt at splitting spells into different types and it's...kind of bad, since the only difference is weight. Berwick does the three different anima magic types reasonably well, and so does Engage. That might be it? Maybe TRS too, though all the cool tomes in that are prfs anyway. I think I had this Nintendo Power, though it was long before Melee imprinted Fire Emblem on my consciousness. I'm pretty sure I remember a DQV or VI NP as well, although maybe there was more of chance of them making it over. Owen is absolutely nothing like Eowyn, though I suppose that goes for Gandalf here too. Maybe references just don't have to make sense. The biggest downgrade from SNES to GBA FE is not the lack of skills, simpler graphics, or smaller maps, it's that you have to count to 10 for long range tomes and status staves again.

Oh, that's interesting. A little bigger than I thought, but still fairly small in the grand scheme of things. Looking at the overlaid maps, some of the smaller kingdoms (Altea, Gra, maybe Grust) would be the size of, say, the Duchy of Milan or the Papal States. So maybe the size of the entire Peloponnese rather than Corinth or Sparta.

There's also Persia/Parthia, which Rome attempted to conquer several times. Might be a better analog than India, though of course there was a land border there. Jugdral did finally discover the secret of boats (probably through Camus washing up there after Book 2, he's gotta go somewhere) in order to invade Lieberia in the ancient past of TRS. Which sets the stage for the obligatory Kaga evil cult that puts the events of TRS into motion. I think the most likely outcome is that Marth's empire doesn't outlast Marth for very long, but, looking at the world map and what we actually see in gameplay maps of Archanea, it seems really small. Even by the standards of Fire Emblem kingdoms, which are pretty small in general. Maybe the best analog is not continent-scale entities like Europe or China, but rather something like the city-states of Greece. They were too fractious to unify themselves, but once Macedon did that for them, they stayed generally administratively unified (though not independent) up to and including the present day. The scale involved probably plays a role there, but then so does being conquered by Macedon, Rome, and the Ottomans.

I contributed about two lines of assembly to Shaya's patch. I was actually eyeing Thracia to do after Mystery (if Vincent would be willing to translate, or maybe using FireLizard's text translation), but Shaya claimed it first. It's probably for the best, Thracia would've eaten grad-school-me alive, it's much more complicated to hack than Mystery and that was a challenge enough for me.

It doesn't always work, but I think Book 2 is where Kaga, having laid the foundations of the genre in FE1 and Book 1, can explore new ideas that would be foundational to his later games. The gameplay / story integration with these Gra soldiers is a good example that does work. We've still got a ways to go on map / enemy formation design, unfortunately. Admittedly, I don't actually remember FE1 or Gaiden that well (even after reading your playthroughs so recently!) so I might be slandering them.

This looks good for a late GCN / early Wii game, but I hesitate to say it looks good in general. I suppose this is a matter of taste, though - I dislike early 3D stuff. I do like that PoR and (especially) RD actually show large armies, but Berwick does this too. (A little more confusingly, since Reese is in charge of his allegedly large army, yet we never see them on the maps. 3H battalions have a sort of weird gameplay role, but a much more straightforward aesthetic role.) Yes, I think being a more indie game was helpful here. FE returning to consoles gave us a much more expansive game in Radiant Dawn, and I'm glad for it, warts and all. But IS couldn't have made PoR in 2D on the GameCube, that just wasn't an option at that point. It's a shame. But back to Berwick itself! I kinda disagree here. Berwick is clearly different from the standard FE formula, especially as it developed after Kaga left in FE6-8, and I think you're right that the lawsuit played a role here. But I think there's a lot of things that show what Kaga learned from his FEs and TRS: Kaga was interested in turning core mechanics into skills in Genealogy (Pursuit, Critical), and that's taken to the next level here with a much rarer Pursuit, and Counter is now a skill too. There are also other ways to counter (dodging, Vengeful), and other ways to follow up (Adept, Desperation, Deathmatch). I don't know that it's the only reason for the 0-1-2 split, but Kaga (and IS) consistently struggled to make archers relevant, and there's no one helped from that split more than archers. Skills are featured in all Kaga games after Genealogy, but I would say they're most impactful in Berwick. Genealogy has Pursuit for impact and TRS has a ton of skills generally, but I think most TRS units are good for stats and prfs rather than skills. Berwick units play really differently depending on skill loadout. Kaga's generally been interested in the player not having a core team - dismounting in Mystery, Thracia, and TRS; free deployment in Gaiden and Genealogy; route splits in Gaiden and TRS; and fatigue in Thracia are all about the player using more units. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. Berwick does this well by having clever map design that encourages the player to bring the unit with the right skills, and the happiness requirements for mercs fit here too. Tons of characters get sidequests. There's the stick of the very harsh EXP formula as well. One thing that's really core to Berwick that I don't think has any antecedents is simultaneous turns. But I think there's a decent amount of refinement going on in addition to experimentation.

I would wager that Berwick's presentation cost less than basically every post-PoR Fire Emblem, but I think it looks better than most of them. The low poly 3D models used until the Switch games just don't look that good compared to the Berwick 2D sprites. And while the fully rendered 3D Switch cutscenes look good, a lot of stuff - like all the supports - are the 3D models doing kind of dumb motions on top of a pre-rendered 2D background. It's a matter of taste, but I prefer the fully 2D Berwick environments to that. Regular FIre Emblem does portraits better much faster (although I, like most people, don't care for the DS portraits). Finally, I prefer Berwick's 2D sprite battle animations to even the Switch high-poly 3D battle animations - Faye's Astra animation is my favorite in the whole expanded series. I really like GBA Fire Emblem's aesthetics, but I think Berwick is really helped by the better resolution on the PS2. Compare the Paladin crit animation in GBA FE to attacking with a Lance (not Spear) in Berwick. The GBA fake charge looks awesome, and the pause and flash on the actual hit are great. It's a great animation! A real charge at high speed with the camera panning, a pause on hit, and then he runs through the enemy! I would guess it's inspired by the GBA animation, but it looks even better, I think. I really like that Berwick lets you decide to show or not show battle animations per battle, incidentally. It's more pleasant than the all-or-nothing FE on/off swich. On the battle theme, I do like that Fates (I think?) introduced battle themes as more intense versions of the map theme, but that's from a decade after Berwick came out. Kaga can't do everything first.

And I loved it so much I wanted to write down why! Berwick Saga is the best Fire Emblem game. First, a huge thank you Aethin for the fan translation (and TRS as well!). I'm so happy I was able to play these games and it's thanks to you. Berwick is in many ways the most Kaga game to have ever Kaga'd, and it all works spectacularly well. The turn mechanic and the general lack of counterattacks and second attacks leads to a very different Fire Emblem experience. I don't think I would like every Fire Emblem to play this way, but I really wish more than just this game did. The way turns work is a great compromise between a pure player and then enemy phase system (like Fire Emblem) and a pure agility system (like Tactics Ogre) that lets all sorts of units shine. And it's the lack of counters that probably makes it all work, since you can't rely on just sitting in enemy range to kill them. Heavily related to turns and counters is the 0-1-2 range split and the related hexes, which I do wish basically every Fire Emblem would adopt. Letting really fast 0-range units counter 1 range attacks gives fast and dodgy units a nice niche, and the ranged crossbow/bow/magic/thrown weapons sets up really interesting weapon and positioning decisions. All these changes make bow users way better than they are in regular FE, and magic users and throwing weapons much more specialized solutions than general purpose murder machines that they often are. (The only really annoying thing here is that enemy dark magic tends to get better range, but that's just because Kaga hates the player.) Probably the last big mechanical change is using specific weapon skills, and this is something else I think all FE should adopt, though I think it should be combined with weapon levels (rather than using level as weapon level as in Berwick). Especially since weapons contribute more to unit offense than is typical in FE (since unit stats are so low), it would be an even better change to use weapon skill levels for not only hit, and but also ability to use/failure rate. Berwick's shaky hit rates aren't to everyone's taste, but there's no reason you have to have bad hit with this setup, it's just that stats in general are low. Tying weapon skills to promotion also makes intuitive sense, although in practice some rates are so low it becomes very annoying. One typical Kaga thing missing is giant promo gains - promotions are more of a nice bonus than a necessity in Berwick, in keeping with the general low stats. Low stats are a pretty common Kaga thing, and they work well here. You gotta team up to take guys out, which also plays very nice with the alternating turns - it doesn't work if they flee and heal, or get in one last blow on a squishy unit. Weapons and the longterm economy in general are super important, much more so than in typical FE, which combines well with the story of slowly losing a war. In addition to great weapon variety, Berwick also does equipment much better than any FE: mounts can typically equip shields for the possibility of extra defense, and infantry get stat boosting equipment and miracle charms. Mercenary characters are another thing I liked but wouldn't want in every Fire Emblem. It makes more sense that not every character would join you immediately, and paying for units gives Berwick the ability to offer you super strong units (like Clifford) to use when you need them. I really wish the game was more transparent with happiness and recruitment conditions (and other things like food effects), but overall it's a cool system and works well with the story. The story is pretty cool, too. For a decent amount of the game, it feels like it's exploring "what if the player was a Camus?" Of course, the Raze Empire doesn't have a Marth on its side, and the game does a good job of showing good and evil units on both sides of the war, but King Volcens being such a bad king is a neat setup. I'd compare it to Conquest, but it's so much better that that seems insulting to Berwick. Maybe a better comparison is Gen 1 of Geneology - Reese is not entirely unlike Sigurd, but he has the advantage of learning politics by being in the seat of power. We also get to see him do things that we only talk about with Sigurd - Reese is constantly actually helping the citizens of Navaron, which is really cool. Things start to shift in Chapter 11 and 12. Finally, a note on Berwick vs modern Fire Emblem. Berwick is much older than modern FE - it came out the same time as Path of Radiance - but it's 2D-ish style holds up a lot better than the Tellius games, so it feels more modern. I'd say the main elements of modern Fire Emblem are reclassing (introduced in Shadow Dragon), pair-up (introduced in Awakening, and toned down a lot in 3H and Engage), and class skills (introduced in Awakening). You could also throw high growth rates & stats in there. All these things combine to make characters feel kinda samey. That's not necessarily bad - it means you can often use the character who appeals the most to you for non-gameplay reasons without suffering any gameplay penalties - but it does take away from the uniqueness of pre-Shadow Dragon characters. Berwick is the exact opposite of this. Every character has their own carefully considered skillset which gives them their own niche. They're pretty well balanced, I think, minus the obvious joke character, and all clearly different. And they're useful in different situations, which encourages you to switch your team up. (So does the very harsh EXP formula.) The general lack of stats also contributes to characters differentiating themselves with skills. It's not necessarily better than modern FE, but it is different, and I really like it for variety's sake. (Funnily enough, I think Engage's Emblems smell a lot like a Berwick-style specialized skillset, it's just you can move them around your units, who can reclass and do some limited skill inheritance. I think this is a cool way to give more genericized characters special niches, though it's kind of weakened by the fact that everyone who wants can inherit Canter and Alacrity or whatever. Often, it feels like a unit using Lyn is more of a Lyn-user than they are their own unit or class. It's also worth noting that all post-Awakening games have borrowed heavily from the skills of TRS and Berwick - I guess Nintendo decided that if they were going to lose their lawsuit over TRS borrowing from FE, they might as well return the favor.) Finally, I want to gush about the characters a bit. I'll put the spoiler characters in spoiler tags as well. Next up, Vestaria Saga if I can convince myself to not immediately start Berwick again. I opened it up to make sure I could get it to work on Linux, and it's, uh, a little bit different graphically than Berwick.

That's an excellent point. It's already been changed to Manakete in most locations (by Quirino or Robert in previous patches), but the item descriptions still have Mamkute. I changed this from what you see in the screenshot above to: Transforms Manaketes into FireDragons And similar, which I think has better verb / object plural agreement and is a byte less than the original so it doesn't run into space issues. A win-win! A clean ROM - this is basically just Robert's patch with the names modified (and some minor typos and such fixed).

The most personally annoying thing about that map is that I got Enid her 4th (and 5th) point of magic the sidequest map before I did this one (Sylvis's Paralogue, as it happens), but she doesn't promote until the start of the next chapter! I was thinking I could use Pallas Leia to roast the bastard, but no such luck. Fortunately, Aegina had my back, but it took her two Fires at iffy hit to take that damn thing down.

Sadly, Kaga invented Dire Thunder two games late for poor Arlen. Ah, a fellow Ulm enjoyer. Well, at least there's not flying enemies with huge range in that snow map like in this desert map.

I think this is a really cool idea. I'd probably go even more on in Hardin and Minerva leading their own forces to do their own things ala Radiant Dawn. Give Hardin and the Wolfguard main army status for your chapters 13 and 14, while Marth fights in the slave market in chapter 12 and shows up late in chapter 14 in the Palace. Nyna gives Marth the Fire Emblem even though Hardin did most of the work. Afterwards, Nyna stays with Hardin and they bicker about invading Grust - eventually Hardin prevails and he gets your Chapters 22 and 24, so Marth doesn't fight Camus but Hardin sure does, with Nyna watching. Give Minerva and her Whitewings your chapters 11, 25, 26, and 27 (maybe not all in a row), and have Marth show up with the advance guard of his army in 27 to lend his support and finally defeat Michaelis. Marth does the initial stuff around the islands in the east, and jointly liberates Archanea with Hardin. He then goes on to fight Gra, then detours in Khadein, and liberates Altea. Hardin meets up with Marth at Orleans, does most of the work in liberating Archanea, then passes through Khadein and Raman - battling the Sable Order on the way - to fight Grust and Camus, claiming the Gradivus in the process. Minerva lands her forces in Macedon and fights her civil war, though she needs Marth's support to finally win. For end of the game, either Hardin and Minerva can join up with Marth to do Raman and Thabes, or they lead an initial assault on Dohlr while Marth collects Tiki and the Falchion.

Yeah, TRS finally gives minor characters dialogue after recruitment, but in long scenes between chapters that feel kind of random. Berwick having Navaron as a hub makes the same sort of deal work so much better, plus literally everyone in Navaron has a name so there can be lots of long running interactions with NPCs, which is also cool. Alas My pitch would be Caeda as the protagonist, ready for revenge after getting spurned by the heartless and power-hungry Dark Emperor Marth. Remix Book 1 a different way -Caeda fights off an invasion from Talys castle, Ogma shows up with the twins reclassed as instead of the axe bros, you fight the Wolfguard at Aurelis, Camus eagerly joins you to get his revenge on unfaithful Nyna...

Yeah, this is true. Book 1 is still somewhat forgiveable since hardware limitations and all, but they did care to flesh things out in Shadow Dragon and just ignored Hardin. That's bizarre. To be fair, nobody is on par with Auffle. I get irrationally attached to FE characters that perform well for me, but even then it's tricky to get that for Hardin since you've probably already been using Cain and Abel. Nobody cares about the third cav. Thracia has the best implementation of the "characters talk in their joining chapter, join you, and then never talk again" style so prevalent in FE (until it was supplanted with "I must retreat so I can still talk in the story" style). The Manster group, Mareeta, Selphina and Glade, Linoan, Saias and Ced, etc. This happens in FE3 and FE6 as well, but I think Thracia does it best by far. It makes it so it's not just Leif, August, and Dorias talking all the time, great as they all are. Raydrick could work! He's exactly the sort of unscrupulous psychopath that you would expect to come to prominence in a Thracia under the Empire's shadow, and he's effective in the scenes he's in. He just disappears for half the game...because his mind-control failed so Kaga got bored of him? Veld is, well, nothing doing, someone with less character than Gharnef is always going to struggle. All of Manfroy's underlings have absolutely nothing going for them, aside from their evil hoods. I'd really like to know what the internal deliberations here were. Is it just that they added Kris and the assassins first and then ran out of time to polish up the main story (and integrate Kris into it)?

I think the difference between Hardin and Lyon is mostly that IS/Kaga didn't really know how to tell a story yet. That's not a defense, exactly. FE3 is marred by Book 1 not really having a plot and Book 2's plot being exposition dumps, so it's not up to the standard of FE8. (IS learned that you can have more than just the lord and advisorman in the plot by making multiple lords in FE7 and that carried through to FE8.) With those (severe) limitations in mind, I think Hardin comes off as a decent enough villain. I don't remember it being implied that Hardin had any reason to believe that Nyna was into him. He's basically nonexistent in FE1/Book 1 after recruitment, but Nyna is one of the few characters that gets lines - most of them pining for Camus. To me, between books Hardin comes off as partially lovestruck over Nyna and partially hungry for power in the upgrade from King of Aurelis to Emperor of Archanea. But that's probably just headcanon, I don't know if any of that is backed up. I think one major thing that distinguishes Hardin from Lyon is we get to see Lyon interact with the twins in flashbacks, where we can start to understand his obsession with being a loser and how he might use the Fire Emblem to rise up to the level of the twins. Obviously this ends with him being mind-controlled. But we never see Nyna tell Hardin she doesn't give a shit about him - FE3 is content to tell, not show, that this loveless marriage is what ends with Hardin being mind-controlled. I think these are reasonably equivalent character motivations, and if anything there's a reason to care about Hardin more than Lyon since we actually get to use him in Book 1. It just doesn't work as well because FE3's story is so slight. It's been forever since I've played New Mystery so it seems like it should be better addressed there, but I guess it's not.

Sort of. In Book 1, he starts off by complaining about being conscripted, but then transitions into being at least a little creepy, at least in the Book 1 direct translation. After a little introduction of what happened when Lena was kidnapped: After you fled from Prince Michalis, Macedon became more and more ruthless. The prince despised me, so he forced me to join the army and fight here. I detest fighting, but if I don't cooperate, they'll execute me. I don't really have a choice. No, brother. You should have been brave and walked on your own path! It was Macedon that was wrong, for allying with the Dolhr Empire and causing its people to suffer. What they're doing is deplorable. Brother, it's not too late. Come with us, and join the Altean Alliance. Everybody will welcome you, because they're all good people. ...Really? I understand. Since I'm going to die anyway, I might as well die a glorious death. However I heard that you flatly denied the prince's proposal. My life is going to be hard with a sister like you. That said, you're still a woman. Are there any guys that take your fancy? Huh...? No, there's nobody... Huh? I was so sure there was. Nevermind, you've already reached the age to freely love. But, remember what I am about to say: Never fall in love with a thief.

Yeah. I'd like to do something about this, but without any Japanese I don't have any idea what is intended. Ah, see, I need to play FE12 again and I would've gotten it, probably. I had no idea Cord was on this map. You know, I was going to bring up Radiant Dawn, but I think I've gone a little heavy on #KagaDidItFirst. But hashtags cannot lie.

It's a bit curious - the font here is the variable width font, which would fit Macedon, but it's displayed as fixed-width. I am somewhat interested in figuring out what it would take to make everything variable width, but don't have the time to look into it presently. We'll see what the future holds. Ich bin dumkopfamerikaner und ich verstehe das nicht. Shouzou "balance is my passion" Kaga introduced dismounting because FE1 mounts are super overpowered, and it would be rude to ride horses indoors. And then decided to supercharge flyers in Book 2 just to keep things "interesting". Libra is...+40% Spd!? Balance! Although, low caps and huge bonuses - also a theme in Thracia - are kind of fun, especially if you want to use terrible units. If anything, it's Macedon that gets off lightly - the patricidal, murder-dragon aligned monarch is alive and gets a redemption arc for some reason. Knowing Kaga? Rommel lol sigh If this was a desert chapter I might change his name

I think Sigurd's problem is that he just sort of keeps attacking. In Verdane, he keeps going after rescuing Edain when he doesn't really need to - he's already destroyed a good part of Verdane's military, he could just go back rather than going through the Spirit Forest. Jamke's forced to send an army against him, but he doesn't have a horse - Sigurd could just retreat having accomplished his mission, and would Jamke ever catch up to him on foot really pursue him back into Grannvalle? Having militant Grannvalle rather than doofy axe barbarian Verdane at Evans is a threat to Augustria. (Another reason to simply leave Verdane!) Elliot and Chagall are not nice people, so maybe's there's nothing Sigurd can do to prevent Chapter 2 once he does decide to obey orders and stay in Evans. But then he obeys orders to stay in Augustria between Chapters 2 and 3, which precipitates several personal crises for him - Eldigan fights him and then is captured, and Deirdre is captured - and in the end he's declared a traitor by Grannvalle anyway! I don't think any of finishing off Verdane, occupying Evans, or occupying Augustria are necessarily stupid decisions - maybe if he retreats Manfroy is able to get Verdane and Augustria to invade Granvalle together, who knows - but the first shows an impulsiveness, and the latter two a misplaced loyalty to Granvalle, largely due to an ignorance of Grannvalle politics that he probably should know. The powers there are his buddy, peaceable Prince Kurth, and Reptor and Lombard who don't like him and wanted to invade Isaach - who does he suppose his orders to occupy a quarter of the world are coming from? This I definitely agree with. The people making a huge mistake in Chapter 5 are Quan and Ethlin. Sigurd has no particular reason to distrust Arvis and plenty of reasons to think he's friendly. Yeah, even if Arvis is friendly it wouldn't hurt to have a cool family heirloom sword that provides a massive resistance bonus. Shades of Ike and Ragnell for sure. Sometimes you just get the opposite of plot armor.

FE1 and Book 1 are really barebones, it makes sense for someone writing FE11 in a vacuum to give Marth a character arc that makes him into an actual hero. Unfortunately, there's this sequel... From what I remember, Book 2 Marthipan snaps out of his wussiness (and alleged Camusesness) quite quickly. I suppose we'll see if that's actually true soon enough. Perhaps he's been busy trying to propose to Caeda since Book 1 ended and that's sapped his courage.

Please do! I hope to make my own observations and fix some typos / grammatical errors. I don't know any Japanese, though, so I'm hesitant to do any real editing of the script for fear of losing the original nuances. For this capitalized At, specifically, I think the idea is that it's a letter with a salutation: But it's pretty awkward as it is. Anticipating him being a speed demon in DSFE! Gotta have a dismounting "tutorial", I guess. I like dismounting as a way to make mounts not the solution to every problem, but sometimes it's more annoying than its worth and this is one of those times. Very much agreed. I did a double take when looking at their NA names next to each other. Why?? Loyally following orders

*crosses fingers that there's no more bugs* Don't feel obligated, if you prefer the European names. Agreed; playing the first three chapters of Book 1 and Shadow Dragon at roughly the same time makes the Wryflessness noticeable, especially compared to, say, Darros, who joins with three other axe users. (And I'm not even using Wrys that much - I'm playing normal and actively killing people off because I want to experiment with the prologue and gaiden characters.)